Cold House – poetry – Jon Cone

Jon Cone has words for language enough to convince one it has not been, nor will it be, a waste to daily attend in-person the decorating of the same small room. It’s not that his Cold House stole my breath and not that it left me speechless, both of which it did, but that it made me feel, in its transcribing of what the future predicts, that I’d at least partially proven the interior life of my shapeless informant. If long ago you took, or recently you’ve taken, your own temperature as something motherless to do for a lonely sickness, and if you want to hear again the orphan pulse of those who ball their pillows while waiting for absence to let itself in, this expertly emptied book is a clarity that clears the head of any distant body once too readily given over to the distilled travelogue of self.